In 1966, a delicacy arrived in Finland that revolutionized Mother’s Day

When toasting, the sugar in the bread dough caramelizes at a low temperature, so the toasted bread gets a crispy surface and the interior remains soft and chewy. Adobe stock / AOP

Nowadays, toast is our everyday bread, which is eaten both for breakfast and for dinner. But it was different in the late 1960s, when toast came to us from England, where toast has a long tradition.

Even in the 1960s, French bread was the main product of light breads. It was unpackaged and kept good for a few days. After 1965, convenience stores and convenience stores began to become more common. When they came, they brought the need for packaged bread.

Toast was the first pre-sliced ​​and packaged bread on the Finnish market. Until the 1990s, toast was packed in cellophane, then in a bag.

A toaster was a popular Mother’s Day gift in the 1970s. In 1972, there was one toaster for every four passenger cars in Finland, so a toaster was still quite rare.

In the beginning, toast was a weekend product for the townspeople and a rarity.

For example, in 1970 in Turku, you could only get toast on Saturdays. In addition to the shopping mall, it was sold in one other store. If you wanted to get toast, you had to be quick, because by afternoon the bread was already sold out.

Fazer started making toast in 1967. In the early days, the demand for toast grew enormously, and production could not keep up.

– Toast was positioned as a delicacy from the beginning, advertising reinforced this image by always using marmalade with toast, says Fazer.

This is how Fazer advertised toast in the 1970s

In the past, the sales spikes for toast were New Year’s, crab season and May Day, because then there was permission and desire to indulge a little. Nowadays, toast has become commonplace, it is most often eaten as a breakfast and evening snack.

Since the beginning, the package sizes of toast have grown. Vaasan brought its first toasts to the market in the 1990s, in the same decade it launched Isopaahto.

Vaasan says that toasts have been developed in accordance with consumer wishes and that is why larger pans were introduced in the 2000s. The thickness of the bread has also changed. Today, the selections have three different slice thicknesses.

The first toast in 1966 was wheat toast. Pretty quickly it was joined by graham. Until the end of the 1970s, only wheat and graham were sold. Oatmeal entered the market in the 1980s. In recent years, oats have started to grow in popularity also in toasts.

Toast is an enduring favorite of bakeries, with consistent sales figures. It did not sag even during the recession in the 1990s.